You realize that Bezos didn't built Amazon on his own, right? There are many, many people who worked for that company (and many of these in this very forum), and all they got was a monthly salary. They own nothing. We are living in the alternative. Most of the people who built Amazon don't own anything of what they created.
What's the argument here. Salary is a salary precisely because of this reason. You get a small something, or you in a non salary scenario get either zero or something way bigger than a salary.
This "they took a risk!" stuff is just success worship crap grilled into people in our culture to justify someone amassing more wealth than most of us can even mentally comprehend.
Bezos came from a privileged background. What was the big risk involved that makes his current level of success so sacrosanct? It's not like he'd be thrown in jail (or worse) if the company had failed. He would have moved on and started a different company or gotten another 6+ figure job.
They received a salary in compensation. I salary they chose to accept. Bezos took all the risk. If Amazon failed he would have failed while employees would have gotten a salary. Risk taking is rewarded.
I'm pretty sure that if Amazon had failed at any point, all of its employees would have been out of a job (and not just the engineers, also the thousands of minimum wage employees), and it's not like Bezos would personally be billions in dollars in debt to the investors of the company -- companies don't work like this, at least in the US. What was exactly the risk taken here by himself, personally?
Amazon was founded in 1994, more than 25 years ago. You are talking about Amazon in 2020. There were many points throughout those 26 years were it could have gone down. The risk he took was building the company from zero, hiring people and paying them a salary. Amazon now employs over 800000 people. If you think that has no merit and Bezos took no risk, then you really don't understand how things work.
You said "people not owning what they create" as though it was an unthinkable option. It's literally what most people do for a living, you said it yourself. What makes Bezos special? Why does he deserve to own ALL the creation of all of these people? I guess it can't be because he came up with the idea of Amazon, right? It is usually pointed out in SV that "ideas are worthless" after all
Doesn’t have to be so boolean. The alternative is taxation.
He didn’t create all of that, he led and directed the efforts of others, who could’ve earned more form their blood, sweat, and tears if he had not.
This is not to deny he’s a smart, highly complement business leader whose management skills acted as a force multiplier that means it was Amazon rather than, say, Walmart, who is the dominant online retailer.
It’s just that saying he deserves all of that $171 billion seems as wrong to me as saying he deserves none of it.
That wealth is not cash. It's control. It's control of something he created and would like to continue to control. He can't convert it into cash without liquidating control.
Imagine is 98% of net worth was in your home. You can't mortgage that without giving up control. This is why even Bill Gates really only started being truly philanthropic at a grand scale once he had decided to relinquish control in Microsoft and pursue his philanthropic endeavors. It was only at that point was he free to do something with that wealth.
We would all be better off letting Bezos build wealth and then tax it at the end. There's going to be a lot more tax money to work if you tax at the end of the prosperity.
I am aware the shares operate like that, and that this is still the case even though he is cashing in enough to run a space program as a hobby. It is nevertheless a bad look for him to run a space program with pocket change while fighting against internal efforts to unionise his workforce.
To steal a cliché from a different sector, I believe that when a corporation is “too big to fail” is becomes a threat to the governments which it operates under and the societies which it operates in. There are many ways to manage this risk, and I am not qualified to study their pros and cons — taxation is a simple solution, and I will accept that simple solutions are probably bad solutions. This does not mean that there are no better solutions.
Many people (particularly in the lower income brackets) prefer to be paid in cash as opposed to equity[1]. Given the chance, most people prefer not to shoulder the risk of an equity stake at the expense of a reduced or non-existent salary.
Is it any surprise then that a lucky few who forgo cash in favor of worthless pieces of paper become super rich after the stock rises?
Many investors are also opposed to giving the poor equity in the company. Richard Garfield encountered significant opposition when he gave equity to roles like cleaning staff in Wizards of the Coast.
Which Amazon products/services did Jeff actually create?
Obviously all the past and present employees created those products, many of which are based on, or dependent on research funded by govt, and also enabled/reliant on a stable society, rule of law, an educated workforce and customer base, transport networks, electric grids, and all kinds of other infrastructure.
The social bargain here is that successful companies then pay back those external govt/societal costs with taxes.
One alternative is to more evenly share the ownership of things that were created by a large group of people.
Jeff deserves a lot of credit for building Amazon; it is now a $1.44T company. But $171B is 12% of that, which for a single person is a lot. Maybe the other million+ people who helped Jeff build Amazon received a smaller share than they deserved?
There are a whole spectrum of options between unchecked capitalism and communism.
I'm just asking what kind of guardrails if any might be appropriate moving forward now that we can see for ourselves how the current system is working for everyone.
